Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In the smart energy grid (e.g., electrical grid) industry, conflicts exist between the consumers' concerns for privacy and the need for utility service providers to collect usage data (via smart utility meters) on their customers in order to optimize the delivery of energy. Utility providers can use real-time household electricity consumption data to forecast future consumption. Being able to forecast energy consumption allows the utility provide more efficient and more stable operation of the electrical grid. However, real-time consumption data may be deemed unacceptably intrusive. Studies have shown that information about a household and its inhabitants can be inferred if high-resolution energy consumption data is available. Thus, for the consumer, the real-time monitoring of consumption data represents an invasion of privacy.
In addition to real-time monitoring, solutions for forecasting consumption and otherwise managing the delivery of energy should not be susceptible to failing smart meters or communication links. A single failure should not prevent the real-time calculation of statistics.
More generally, the ability to calculate statistics in real-time, i.e., in the presence of failures, can also benefit many other real-world applications like public health and clinical research on patient information or any data collection and monitoring where privacy sensitive data is processed.